Resurrection
by SilverTurtle
Summary: Juliet heard the voice...but how could she hear anything? She was dead. Was it the voice of an angel? No, it was no angel. It was far better.


**A/N:** Proof that I am still capable of writing out of the Suite Life fandom, hooray! This is an AU set eleven years after the events of episode 3x9 "Wizards vs. Werewolves," it discounts everything that came after that.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own WoWP, but I dearly wish I did. Mason would never have happened if I had been in charge.

**Warning:** Character death is mentioned, several times. Characterization is a little different from what you're used to. Oh yeah, like practically always, femslash.

**RESURRECTION**

*****'*****

It was dark when she woke up, disoriented and bewildered.

She felt she was laying flat on a thin blanket over a metal table, the chill of the metal seeping into her bones. She could smell burnt incense thick in the air and something lighter but indefinable, she felt she should be able to identify it and simply couldn't remember. She heard breathing, soft and indistinct. But she still couldn't see anything.

"It worked," a hushed voice said somewhere in the room. She couldn't pinpoint the origin of the voice though she whipped her head around to try. She realized her senses, though usually excellent, were still not working quite right.

"Holy crap! It worked! I did it! I actually did it!" the voice laughed. It sounded familiar to her, but strange. Like she'd heard it somewhere before, but couldn't remember where.

Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark.

She should have been able to see immediately, being a vampire gave her heightened senses, but something strange was going on…she felt dulled somehow. Muffled. Like the whole of her was swaddled in a blanket. She didn't understand how it was possible. She shouldn't even be alive…well, undead…or something. She shouldn't be here.

She remembered the fight, the scratch from Mason, all of her many years attacking her at once. She remembered _feeling_ her age as she never had before. She remembers debilitating pain as her body deteriorated in mere moments while she said her goodbyes to a boy she could have loved. She remembered wandering off into the woods, every step excruciating to her ancient body, away from those she cared about so they wouldn't have to see her die. She remembered hearing a mournful howl before falling to the ground. She remembered the scent of frost and loam, the slightly slimy feel of damp rotting leaves clinging to her wrinkled forehead and hands, the blurs of brown in her sight that were those same leaves she lay upon. She remembered dragging in a ragged breath wishing she had the energy to scream, because everything hurt _so much,_ but knowing she couldn't because her body was wasting away by the moment and all that would come out was a weak and pitiful sob. And she remembered something she hadn't felt in millennia, the glorious feeling of the sun on her skin, so warm and inviting, as it rose over the horizon bringing the new day with it.

And then she'd just…stopped.

Stopped thinking. Stopped feeling. Stopped remembering because there wasn't anything else to remember. She'd stopped _being_. She thought that she must have died then. It had felt almost like falling asleep, only it had been instantaneous. There had been no moments where she'd hovered between asleep and awake. One moment she'd been aware, thinking, weeping for the pain and injustice of this end, and then she'd been…nothing.

She'd thought she would never wake again.

She shouldn't have ever woken again. She remembered _her own death_. Her body surely would have crumbled into nothing the moment the sun hit it, even though she was nearly fully human again, the little bit of vampire still in her would have ensured she turned to dust. Why, then, was she here? Awake and aware and _feeling_ again?

Her adjusted eyes roved around, finding cellar walls and a shadowy figure. She could just make out features of the face, the wide eyes and an incredulous grin, her enhanced sight returning to the keenness of the predator she'd once been but still blurred by the darkness surrounding them.

The figure moved, held up an object that looked so much like a stake her instincts screamed at her to flee or kill. Her undead heart jumped into her throat as her mind panicked and the silhouette drew nearer. Her brain compelled her to scramble away but failed in its attempt even to sit her up. Her hands and legs pushed uselessly against the table, scrunching the fabric covering it but doing nothing to shift her. She was distressingly uncoordinated. She realized then she felt weak, so very weak, and frail. She was starving and feeble but in no pain.

"Juliet?" the voice called gently, cracking with emotion, and the figure used the object to make light. Momentarily blinded, Juliet squeezed her eyes shut. That had hurt. She wasn't sure if pain was a good sign or not, but it passed swiftly enough. She opened her eyes again.

The figure, a woman, was familiar yet…not. And she was coming closer, a look of such caring in her eyes that Juliet wished she could remember her. She almost could, the voice brought to mind a younger girl with a playful grin, dark hair, and a heart-shaped face…but surely this woman and that girl couldn't be the same. So much time couldn't have passed for that girl to become this woman. Not if Juliet was awake again (for she must have been asleep, and _not_ dead, if she was awake again. And she'd never slept for years before). So this woman couldn't be the girl in Juliet's still hazy memories. Surely not.

But the object in the woman's hand (_a wand_, her struggling mind supplied), was one she recognized. One that had belonged to that girl. To Alex. But it was impossible. It simply couldn't be that so much time had passed.

"I won't hurt you," the woman said, "I promise." The smile the woman gave was fragile but full of triumph. "I can't believe it actually worked," she whispered almost to herself in a tone of subdued awe as her eyes roamed up and down Juliet's body, almost inspecting her and drinking her in all at once.

"Who are you?" was what Juliet tried to ask, but only a squeaking noise actually made it out.

The woman's eyes snapped to Juliet's own and her face adopted a look of contrition and concern. She moved to be fully beside the table and she reached out to help Juliet sit up. Her hands were hot on Juliet's arm and back. She felt like those hands might burn her if they stayed too long. She hadn't realized how sensitive her skin was until that moment.

She suddenly felt like her senses were no longer muted as they'd been before, and their unexpected return was nearly too much. It was too bright and her eyes stung. The woman was too close, she could feel the heat from her skin scalding her. The woman's breathing sounded too loud and sonorous enough to shake down buildings as it thundered in Juliet's mind. And her scent…her scent was driving Juliet mad; with hunger, with lust, she wasn't sure. All she knew was that she could practically taste the cinnamon scented skin and the blood pounding through veins visible in that delicate neck and it made her ravenous.

The woman turned away, and if Juliet hadn't been so weak she might have pounced on her right then. But she was weak and the woman turned back, her hands occupied with a thermos and her eyes locked with Juliet's own.

As soon as the lid came off, Juliet knew what that thermos contained and her stomach roared in recognition.

Blood.

A-positive.

Her favorite.

"Here," the woman said, cupping the back of Juliet's head firmly and gently to steady her and raising the thermos to parched lips, "I should have done this first."

The hot wash of liquid down her throat revitalized Juliet and brought everything that had been indistinct and hazy into sharp focus. Her strength immediately returned. She could feel her flesh plumping again, reclaiming its natural lushness. Her hands reached up and grasped the thermos. She drained it as quickly as possible, ignoring the streaks that spilled out of the corners of her mouth and slid wetly down her neck to soak into the long shirt she wore. She felt like herself again.

The woman had stood back once Juliet had taken charge of the thermos and now stood watching her with a slightly amused and slightly disgusted expression. Her voice broke the silence, "I forgot what you were like when you were really hungry."

Juliet's eyes flashed to her, latched on and studied her. And now that her mind was working again, she could see this woman was the girl she'd known. A little taller, face lacking the baby fat it had retained in her teens, lines just barely beginning at the corners of her eyes, those were the only differences. She still had that same arrogant stance, the maddening and endearing smirk, the mischievous and twinkling eyes, and that unmistakable voice. "Alex," Juliet sighed out.

The smirk the woman wore grew into a full blown smile. "You remember me?"

Juliet picked out the notes of disbelief and pleasure. She nodded, "What happened? How did I end up here?" she asked, "How much time has passed?" Her hand reached out and lightly brushed the side of Alex's face, stunned when Alex leaned into that touch.

"Eleven years," Alex replied, her voice husky with repressed emotion, "I brought you back."

"Back? From where?" But even as she asked she knew. She _had_ been dead. And Alex had brought her back. Her voice solemn she asked, "Why?"

She watched with amazement and not a little horrified shock as Alex's eyes filled with tears and her breath hitched with sobs. "Things," Alex's voice squeaked and she cleared her throat, "Things weren't the same after you…" she couldn't bring herself to say 'died' so she said, "left." Juliet watched her take a deep breath, "Justin and I fought all the time. We were vicious and spiteful. Justin blamed me. For you. For bringing Mason into our lives. For everything that went wrong after. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted me to hurt as badly as he did for losing you. I was already hurting over losing you and Mason, so I lashed out at him. And we were just…just so _awful_ to each other. We said things, did things, that couldn't ever be taken back. It made no sense for us to be so terrible but it kept happening, over and over. I knew it was wrong, so did he, but we just _couldn't_ _stop_. It all hurt so much."

Juliet felt sympathetic tears start building hot in her eyes and she reached out to hold Alex's hand, hoping to give her the strength to continue.

"He actually attacked me with magic," Alex said in a subdued whisper, "and I had to defend myself. The backlash from our spells colliding nearly killed us both. I don't think it was until he saw me bleeding that he realized how…how useless all this anger and rage and blame between us was. When I looked at him he was crying. That's when I knew exactly how broken we were. It's when I decided I had to make things right." Alex looked into Juliet's eyes, banishing her tears and pain by sheer force of will, "I had to bring you back."

"I dedicated myself to my magical studies then, hoping I'd find some way to undo all the damage I'd done." Alex continued, "And then, before I knew it, two years had passed and it was time for the Wizard Competition. Justin and I were nearly back to the relationship we'd had before, but the hurt was still there, still a barrier between us. And when I won the competition he didn't speak to me for months. But I kept learning. Kept hoping I'd find the way to turn back time or something."

"What happened?" Juliet asked quietly, "What came next?"

"Next?" Alex tilted her eyebrows down, grief clouding her eyes as she held Juliet's gaze, "next, Justin asked me to remove his memories of you."

Juliet reared back, shock and sorrow warring for dominance in her heart. Her voice was small and hurt as she asked "He wanted to forget about me?"

Alex shook her head, eyes closing tiredly, "No. He loved you. So much. He never _wanted_ to forget about you, but he had to. He couldn't move on, couldn't find himself, couldn't _live_ without you. He was still grieving for you, pining for you…it was making him sick. He lost the competition and nearly let himself die before coming to me. He said if he could forget you he could finally start living again. When he asked me to do the spell he said he thought you would have kicked his butt for being so stupid and letting himself come so close to death," Alex smirked a little.

Juliet grinned back. She _would_ have beaten him up and set him back on track. "He's right. I would have…so what did you do?"

"I cast the spell," Alex said regretfully, "I'm sorry, Juliet. But he needed it so badly. He wouldn't have lasted much longer if I hadn't."

"But what about the rest of your family? Wouldn't they mention me to him? Wouldn't that break the spell?"

Alex shook her head, "It wouldn't have mattered. Not with the spell I cast. With full wizard powers there's nothing short of my removing it that could break it and Justin made me promise that I wouldn't. He had me sign an oath in blood before I cast the spell, so even if I wanted to I couldn't."

"Then why?" Juliet asked, confused and angry and upset. She knew Justin hadn't been the love of her unlife, he was mortal in a way she hadn't been and that was an issue that was pretty much insurmountable while he was only a wizard-in-training and one they would have had to confront eventually and then Juliet would have split with him. And now, since Justin didn't even remember her there seemed no reason to this, no sense, "Why bring me back at all?"

Alex looked mournfully at the restored vampire, "Because by then I realized I wasn't doing it for him. I never had been. I was doing it for you…and for me."

She was almost afraid to ask, "What do you mean?"

"What happened to you was unfair," Alex said with some heat, "You didn't do anything wrong! You stood up for your boyfriend. You fought to protect him from a real monster. You won! And your reward for that was becoming mortal again? Dying? Alone." Alex shook her head and gripped Juliet's hands tightly, "It was wrong, and it was all my fault! I had to fix it. You deserved that and so much more. I ruined your life! Practically killed you-"

"No." Juliet said in a voice that brooked no argument, "None of that was your fault. None of it. It was all just…bad luck. Uncontrollable circumstances. You shouldn't have blamed yourself."

"You're sweet, but you're wrong." Alex's voice held the weight of guilt, of experience, of old and exhausted pain that was somehow still fresh, "If I hadn't been so selfish, so _stupid_, none of it would have happened. If I had just believed Mason when he said he loved me, or never gone back for that ridiculous necklace, or let our breakup stand because who was I kidding? He wasn't the love of my life! I was an idiotic, self-centered teenager! What was I doing thinking I could be in love with him? I had barely known him a week!"

"That doesn't mean you were wrong about your feelings for him," Juliet argued, "Yes, you were young but sometimes love happens like that." Juliet grinned at the woman who was still her junior, "I should know. I do have a lot more experience than you."

Alex scoffed, letting her anger dwindle in the face of Juliet's indomitable spirit, "Maybe, maybe not. The point is you didn't deserve what you got and I had to make it right."

"Okay," Juliet said, accepting that, "So that's why you were doing it for me. Why were you doing it for you?"

"I didn't realize this until after I had erased Justin's memory of you," Alex said, a blush beginning to spread high across her cheekbones, "Or at least, I couldn't admit it to myself until then, but I…" she trailed off in an unintelligible mumble and looked away.

"Spit it out Alex," Juliet could scent Alex's nervousness, her embarrassment, and was that…was that…no. It couldn't be. This had to be a trick of her senses; she must still be a little haywire after the resurrection.

"Fine." Alex groaned and looked as though she the words were being dragged from her through some extreme methods of torture, "I was doing this for me because I kind of loved you, too."

"Kind of?" Juliet pressed, 'kind of' is not the scent she was getting from a nose that obviously _was_ smelling what she'd thought it was and in correct working order. 'Kind of' wasn't even in the ballpark of the intensity of the scent pouring from Alex. When she'd been dating Justin and had picked up on this scent of love she'd always thought the whole of it came from him, she hadn't even considered that every time she'd scented it Alex had also been in the room. She remembered smelling the attraction tinted with Alex's cinnamon scent when Alex had first set foot in the Late Nite Bite, weeks before Justin had ever seen her, and how strongly she'd smelled the cinnamon scent growing every week she'd been near the Russos. Justin's own pine scent had been sharp and strong but nearly dwarfed by Alex's, and Juliet had never thought (blinded as she'd been by Justin's puppy love) that she had been responding to Alex's scent instead of Justin's. Now that she did think about it, it was clear she'd been primed by Alex's scent, and by her attraction to that scent, so that when Justin had asked her out she was responding to lingering traces of Alex in the shop and not to Justin's interest at all.

The scent of cinnamon, of Alex, was everywhere, practically overwhelming, but Juliet found it inviting rather than oppressive.

"Okay, alright," Alex whined a little, "So I was totally in love with you, I just didn't know it. Harper says it's the only thing that makes sense now. She says I threw myself at Mason just when you and Justin started getting serious because I must have been transferring feelings for you onto a more attainable person and sometimes I want to smack her when she uses that darned psychology degree on me, but she isn't wrong."

"Isn't?" Juliet needed clarification, needed Alex to say what she was so studiously avoiding.

Alex pouted at Juliet and rolled her eyes, "Isn't." she confirmed. "I loved you then and my feelings haven't changed…well, at least not in the 'growing less' sense."

Juliet thought that was probably the best Alex could do right at the moment so she moved on to "How did you even manage this?"

Alex brightened considerably and started to explain, "Well, it wasn't easy. I was really behind in my wizard studies when I decided to fix everything so I had a lot of catching up to do. And once I had the full powers I still had a lot of learning to do. Do you have any idea how many books of spells there are?"

Juliet shook her head, a little amused at the look of remembered horror on Alex's face.

"Millions. And most of them are so useless! I had to dig through libraries and search through obscure and ancient texts just to find even the _type_ of spells I was looking for! It was awful! And then," Alex continued in a rant as she moved over to a stack of books Juliet hadn't seen in the corner of the room, "Then I had to find ways to combine a bunch of different spells to bring you back to life, give you your immortality, and age you appropriately-"

"Age me?" Juliet interrupted, "You aged me?"

"Uh, yeah," Alex said in a voice that implied that should have been obvious. She waved a hand and a holographic doppelganger of the vampire appeared in front of a now standing Juliet, "I figured you wouldn't want to look seventeen for another few hundred years once I brought you back, so I aged your human form as many years as you'd been dead. It made bringing you back easier, actually, since when you died you weren't quite human and weren't quite vampire, so the spells took into account each year you would have aged had you been a mortal girl when you died. And since the image I had of you in my head was of your teenaged vampiric form, and not your actual appearance at your time of death, the spell took effect on that image and aged you from there."

Juliet had pretty much tuned out most of that magical theory lecture (and how weird was it that Alex was going off on that purely academic tangent? She must have matured over the years to get so serious about magic) as she stared at herself. She was a little taller, more full figured, face more mature…it was odd, but good. She looked like the adult she'd mentally been for a long time now. "I can't believe you did this," she breathed.

A worried Alex immediately responded, "If you don't like it I could probably find a spell to take you back to looking seventeen-"

"No!" Juliet interjected, "I like it. I like it a lot. Thank you. I'm just…how were you able to do this? How long did it take you?"

"Eleven years," Alex replied matter-of-factly, "Finding the spells was no picnic, but I managed. And please, I'm Alex Russo. I was so on it. I'm one of the most powerful and naturally gifted wizards of the last five hundred years. I wasn't going to let a little thing like hard work stop me."

Juliet grinned at her, "I can't believe you managed this. You're kind of amazing"

"Kind of?" Alex scoffed, "Please. Doing all that research, tying all those spells together, performing them correctly, and having you come out as beautiful as you are-I'm totally amazing." And because she doesn't always know when to shut up she continued, "Besides, it's not like I was going to bring my girlfriend back looking like a teenager. That would make me look like a creeper and I do _not_ need that kind of reputation, even if you were a completely hot teenaged vampire. Now you're a completely hot adult vampire. Much better."

"Girlfriend?" Juliet asked archly but not without humor. She would be, there wasn't really a question about that. Alex had devoted eleven years of her life to get Juliet back, the least Juliet could do was give a relationship with her a shot. She was attracted to Alex, had always been, but she had to tease her a little just to make sure Alex didn't get too full of herself.

Alex's eyes got wide and she hastened to back-track, "Of course, that's only if you want to be." The suddenly bashful Alex fiddled with the spellbook in her hands, scuffed her sneaker along the floor, averted her eyes and made a generally adorable picture. "I really did do this to give you the back the life I took."

Juliet crossed the distance between them, wrapped her arms around Alex's waist and settled her head on the wizard's shoulder. She breathed in, enjoying Alex's scent and the sound of her racing heartbeat, "You didn't take my life Alex. You've given it back, better than before. And I'd love to."

"Love to…?"

Juliet pulled back to look into Alex's eyes, and indulgent smile gracing her lips, "Be your girlfriend. I'd love to be your girlfriend."

"Really?" Juliet had never heard that note of insecurity in Alex's voice, and she was touched by the vulnerability.

"Yes," she said and leaned up to kiss Alex's cheek, "Really."

"Good," Alex said, "Because that stuff about giving you your life back? Still completely true, but I was really hoping you'd give me a chance. Give us a chance," she amended while waving a hand between them. And because she doesn't always know when to shut up she continued, "Besides, I still really want to see your calzone trick. These years of suspense have been killing me!"

Juliet laughed.

*****'*****

A/N: That's it. You've read, now review.


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